New York University Spring 2014 Approaches to Chinese Cinema Prof. Erin Huang Midterm Exam Total points possible: 100 (25 points each) 1. What is Rey Chow’s definition of “primitive passions”? Based on what you have studied in this course, write a short answer that will provide a sophisticated counterargument. [Please do not write down your personal beliefs. Compose your answer by analyzing Chow’s assumptions, and take into consideration the films and history of the 1980s and 1990s.] Rey Chow defines primitive passions as being “a new way of looking at China by Chinese intellectuals…as if it were a foreign culture peopled with unfamiliar others,” that is to say, the tendency of Chinese intellectuals to look at China through the lens of the Other, or the Primative (Chow 19). She compares them with European modernist artists such as Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, whose art “is inseparable from a certain fascination with the primitive,” which in this case points to those who are “othered” in Chinese society – peasants, women, children (Chow 19). In European painters, primitivism is used “to articulate what [the painters] believed o be the basic humanity in us all,” and this is used in similar ways by Chinese authors in the early 20th century and, she also argues, by Fifth Generation film directors, placing ‘woman’ in the position of ‘primitive’ (Chow 21). This however, is in itself an essentialist and simplistic reading both of modern Chinese literature as well as of modern Chinese cinema. While it is possible that many of the films of directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige are directed at a largely international audience, or that their search for “Chineseness” is tied into a fetishisation of rural women being made into a representation of abstracts instead of a complex portrayal of existence, her own analysis might rely on her perceptions of what the countryside, or what Chinese women, ought to be. Their films are after all, shot in China and feature – if digitally augmented or idealized – Chinese landscapes, and though they might be images that are more palatable for consumption, that does not make them any less ‘real’ or ‘honest’ in their Chinese-ness. The search for an “authentic China” is as evident in her writing as it is in the films of the Fifth Generation directors, and as she criticizes them for filming a ‘real China’ that is by and large for the consumption of non-Chinese, she herself might hold just as essentialist an understanding of what is “authentically” Chinese, because while the desolate landscapes of Red Sorghum, for example, conform to an exoticism that international audiences might want to see and what Zhang Yimou might be pandering to, it is still ultimately no less Chinese for all its conformity. If the criteria for an ‘honest’ portrayal of China not to be popular among foreign audiences, then even many domestically-popular films may not be able to pass. Many Fifth Generation films, including those of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, were reactions to the Cultural Revolution. Their experience with land, their understanding of land, is fundamentally different as members of a generation who were sent down to the countryside to do hard labor and be reeducated. And while this may manifest itself in the portrayal of the countryside in the same way as one would if it viewed it as an exotic locale, this does not necessarily indicate correlation in intent, though it may be ultimately, within the confines of Chinese society, an urban understanding and experience. 2. Who are the “Fifth Generation” filmmakers? This course has introduced you to several different Fifth Generation filmmakers. Based on their films, write a short answer that will help your reader complicate his/her understanding of what the “Fifth Generation” mean. Consider the filmmakers’ personal background, aesthetic styles, and the historical context of contemporary China. You may point out the characteristics of the “Fifth Generation” by comparing a Fifth and non-Fifth generation film. You might also want to consider differences among Fifth Generation filmmakers. The common understanding of Fifth Generation directors is that they are the first group of filmmakers to come out of the Cultural Revolution, and are the group of people who spearheaded modern Chinese cinema. Though in more recent years they’ve been censured by critics for selling out into commercialism, their films are still considered classics, and have been lauded by critics and given awards at film festivals, and their use of colour (particularly that of Zhang Yimou), as well as their rural and historical settings, have become characteristic of the style and understanding of Fifth Generation work. However, insofar as much as they are at the forefront of Chinese cinema, they are simultaneously reactors to the circumstances around them, and much of their inventiveness is not so much a product of personal genius as it is necessity. The political environment of many of their early films, as is especially evident through the case of Zhang Yimou, made it necessary for him to couch any possible readings of political criticism in many social and historical layers – for example, the rebelliousness that is evident in Red Sorghum could possibly be read as a rebellion against the socialist rule that formed the backdrop for Zhang Yimou’s childhood, or it could be just as easily spun to be rebelliousness against the bourgeois, given that the grandfather’s act of killing Jiu’er’s husband is more literally the killing of a business owner by a peasant. No doubt this carefulness is a product of Zhang Yimou’s experiences during his own childhood; the Cultural Revolution was a period where people had to be exceptionally careful about what they said to other people: his contemporary, Chen Kaige, even denounced his own father. This manifests itself in other ways in the works of Li Shaohong, who is the only woman among the ranks of the Fifth Generation directors. The film of hers we watched, Baober in Love, was released in 2004, when the commercial demands of the movie industry relaxed the political control over film production. However, these same layers of reality are still present. While Zhang Yimou’s films layer past and present to deliver ambiguous critique of the political system of Chinese governance, Li Shaohong layers them in order to create a separate space, in order to critique economic change in China. In either case, the technique is the same – different ‘layers’ of time, or of space, both simultaneously a critique against and a reaction shaped by Chinese society and government policy. 3. Connect Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to contemporary Chinese cinema. As we have discussed, the development of post-1980s Chinese cinema (as well as visual culture in general) is inseparable from China’s economic reform, or “socialism with a Chinese characteristic.” While Baudrillard wrote his observations based on western societies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these observations still seem relevant in the contemporary world and in contemporary China. Write a short answer that explains what Baudrillard is saying about the cultural changes brought by capitalism, and whether his notion of the “simulacra” can be used unproblematically to understand contemporary China, which is both socialist and capitalist. You may choose to use a film or textual example from the syllabus to illustrate your answer. Think in terms of how a filmmaker is responding to what Baudrillard is saying through his/her film. Simulacra, in Baudrillard’s explanation of them, are representations of reality that have divorced themselves from reality, and realities that cease to matter in the face of these packaged, consumable simulations of what is real. While Baudrillard’s critique of simulacra can be extended to certain facets of modern-day Chinese capitalism – Cultural Revolution restaurants, for example, and imagery of Mao Zedong that exist utterly separate from both the man and his beliefs, his insistence on simulacra being always a tool on behalf of capitalism, and in that effect an absolute negative, is too simplistic an approach to modern Chinese cinema. Feng Xiaogang’s Big Shot’s Funeral, for example, uses simulacra both in the way Baudrillard prescribes an in a way that is subversive – the film itself becomes a simulacrum that satirizes capitalism. The film is very self-consciously creating simulations of simulacra through the habitual use of pull-back shots to reveal that what was first presented to us as reality (the birthing scene, the asylum scene) was actually just an act for the camera. In this way (and the knowledge that this, too, is a film and is all staged for the lens of one man’s camera), Feng Xiaogang forces his audience to almost constantly think about reality, and their perception of reality, even within the framework of their watching and consuming his film. Don Taylor’s death is a lie, his funeral is a lie, the birthing scene is a lie, the asylum scene is a lie. What, then, is the truth? What is in Baudrillard’s estimation is a passive act of pure consumption on the part of the audience, Feng Xiaogang challenges that by making this passivity active through forcing his audience to challenge their own perceptions of reality and his portrayal of it. 4. In Lu Tonglin’s interview with filmmaker Li Shaohong, Li changed her position when asked if she considered herself a “feminist” filmmaker. Write a short answer that provides a historically and culturally rich explanation for her change. How do we understand “feminist” filmmaking in postsocialist China? What is Li’s approach in representing women’s experiences? Your answer should include some analytical reference to Li’s Baober in Love. The phrase feminism in China is very tied to the Communist Party’s agenda and its rhetoric of equality, and so any filmmaker who aligns themselves with feminism as a Chinese movement could be seen as implicitly accepting Party policy. Moreover, not only does being a “feminist filmmaker” pigeonhole her work, but the word feminism implies a gender-based understanding of her films. But while many of her films focus on gender and are a significant lens through which she, and her characters, see the world, the core of her focus is not necessarily criticism on social constructions of gender, but rather, gender is incorporated into other criticism. In Baober in Love, for example, the protagonist, Baober, is a victim of the rapid urbanization of her hometown due to China’s fast-paced economic reform. As a result, she loses her “safe space,” her home, and, in one memorable sequence in the beginning of the film, buildings collapse and rise in quick succession around a screaming Baober. This question of space becomes significant not only in her criticism ways that capitalism is consuming cultural and social space, but also in the gender-specific ways it is enacted. Following the Chinese economic boom, for example, a disproportionate amount of women were made homeless – a literal loss of space. But in the case of Baober, her loss of space manifests itself into a creation of her own reality – her own space. Capitalism makes it that we doubt our own realities, but Baober rejects this, and is able to create her own understanding, her own space away from capitalism and is, at some point in the movie, successful in bringing another person in. But in the end, even this space is invaded, both physically, with Liu Zhi bringing in furniture, computers, electronics though Baober insisted they weren’t necessary, and mentally, when her own body and mind, her own space, betrays her by giving her the vestiges of pregnancy without the realities of it. In this way, Li Shaohong is able to make gendered critiques of society without falling into the Party’s official gender line, and is able to separate her own perceptions of gender in contemporary China from the perception the Party tells her to have.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:53:57 +0000
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